Helen Foster Snow, 89, a Founder Of Industrial Co-ops in China

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Helen Foster Snow, who helped bring social change to China in the 1930's, witnessed revolution and war and throughout wrote to promote American-Chinese understanding, died on Saturday at the Fowler Nursing Center in Guilford, Conn. She was 89 and lived in Madison, Conn.

In China, she was remembered for her key role in creating the Gung-Ho (Work Together) movement of industrial cooperatives in Shanghai in the 1930's. She was credited with the concept, put it to work with Edgar Snow, her husband at the time, and a few others, and watched from afar as the idea caught on all over China.

In 1958, the cooperatives were co-opted by the victorious Communists, who merged them into state-run communes. Mrs. Snow liked to point out that besides starting the Gung-Ho movement, she helped enrich the American vocabulary with the term.

She ventured to China at the age of 24 in 1931 with the promise of a mining company secretarial job secured through her father, a Utah lawyer with connections to the state's mining industry.

But her ambition was to write, and to meet Mr. Snow, the leftist journalist who later wrote ''Red Star Over China.'' They married, and she joined him in reporting the Chinese civil war and the Japanese invasion.

In the 1940's, the couple settled in Madison in a farmhouse built in 1792. They divorced in 1949, just as McCarthyism was gathering steam in the United States. Publishers shunned their work for awhile, but they were never called before the Congressional hearings that tarred the careers of many Americans who had been active in China in the 1930's and 40's.

Mr. Snow died in 1972. Mrs. Snow revisited China afterward, and her considerable literary output included books written under the pseudonym Nym Wales.

She published ''China Builds for Democracy: A Story of Cooperative Industry,'' ''The Chinese Labor Movement,'' ''Red Dust: Autobiographies of Chinese Communists as Told to Nym Wales,'' ''Women in Modern China'' and ''An American Experience in Yenan.''

The Indian edition of ''China Builds for Democracy'' carried a foreword by Jawaharlal Nehru, who adapted the Gung-Ho pattern to establish some 10,000 industrial cooperatives in India.

Her last published work was an autobiography, ''My China Years: A Memoir'' (Morrow, 1984).

Last year, China named her a Friendship Ambassador, one of the highest honors for a foreign citizen. The citation noted that six decades ago Mrs. Snow made the arduous trip to the caves of Yanan in Northern Shaanxi Province to interview Mao Zedong and his associates at the end of their Long March. The Gung-Ho cooperatives then had the support of both Mao and Chiang Kai-shek.

Born in Cedar City, Utah, Helen Foster attended the University of Utah as well as Yanjing and Qinghua Universities in Beijing.

The couple kept the American public up to date on the Beijing student movement that rallied resistance to the Japanese in 1935. She was present when the military forced Chiang to ally himself with the Communists against the Japanese, and she then risked her life to visit Yanan for four months to gather information from that Communist base.

Mrs. Snow, who never remarried, had no children, and there are no immediate survivors.

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